History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  APRIL-MAY. Armed conflict between Serb forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army escalates in Kosovo.

  1-3 MAY. A special EU summit in Brussels announces that monetary union will be launched on 1 January 1999 with eleven countries participating.

  22 MAY. In a referendum, voters in Northern Ireland approve the “Good Friday Agreement.”

  31 MAY. A coalition led by President Milo Djukanovic, a critic of Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, wins parliamentary elections in Montenegro.

  1 JUNE. An international aid package is announced in response to financial crisis in Russia.

  8 JUNE. Threatening a strong Western response to Serb actions in Kosovo, British foreign secretary Robin Cook says, “I hope Milošević is listening. This is the last warning.”

  20 JUNE. All EU ambassadors are withdrawn from Belarus in protest at President Lukashenka’s attempt to evict them from their embassies.

  25 JUNE. Voting in Northern Ireland to elect a new assembly.

  7 JULY. Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is sentenced to two years and nine months’ imprisonment for bribing tax officials.

  8 JULY. Viktor Orbán of the “Young Democrats” (FIDESZ) becomes prime minister of Hungary.

  8-9 JULY. Gdansk, Poland. I visit the former Lenin Shipyard, birthplace of Solidarity. It is now almost an industrial archaeology site, with head-high weeds, rusting hulls, and only a couple of ships being built this year. One of the shipyard halls has been converted into a techno-rock discotheque. Lech Wałȩsa tells me he feels a kind of “moral hangover” when he looks at the shipyard now. Certainly, all the radical, neoliberal changes to a free-market economy were essential. There was no other way. But he feels that somehow they should have done more for this place.

  9 JULY. A new Czech government is formed under Social Democrat prime minister Miloš Zeman, based on a pact with the center-right Civic Democratic Party of former prime minister Václav Klaus.

  28 JULY. Mališevo, unofficial capital of the Kosovo Liberation Army, is retaken by Serb forces.

  AUGUST. Financial “meltdown” in Russia.

  15 AUGUST. A terrorist bomb kills twenty-eight people in Omagh, Northern Ireland.

  23 AUGUST. President Yeltsin sacks his cabinet for the second time in five months and replaces Prime Minister Sergei Kiryenko with Victor Chernomyrdin.

  26 AUGUST. The Russian ruble loses 40 percent of its value against the deutsche mark after trading in dollars is suspended.

  9-11 SEPTEMBER. Slovenia. A long conversation with President Milan Kučan, eloquent about his country’s new-old location in Central Europe. Referring to the Serbs’ view of Kosovo as the historic cradle of their nation, he says, “Our Kosovo is in Austria.” He means Carinthia, the medieval duchy or Civitas Carantania, back to which the Slovenians trace their historic nationhood.

  I assume that, as the man who led the first former Yugoslav republic to fight for its independence from Milošević’s Serbia, he might support the Kosovar Albanians in their struggle for independence from Milošević’s Serbia. But no. A lawyer by training, he insists that Kosovo was always part of the Republic of Serbia, not a constituent part of Yugoslavia, and therefore does not have the right to secede. Altogether, he shows remarkably little sympathy for the Kosovar Albanians, whom he describes as a “rural patriarchal society” with an insatiable appetite for land. He speaks like a Central European contemplating some remote, slightly barbaric part of the Balkans. Yet ten years ago, they were part of the same country.

  11 SEPTEMBER. Postcommunist Yevgeny Primakov becomes the Russian prime minister.

  22 SEPTEMBER. The Polish parliament votes to give people access to their own secret-police files from the communist period.

  23-26 SEPTEMBER. Poland, for publication of the Polish edition of my book about the Stasi files, The File. A young presenter on breakfast television interviews me about my experiences with the Stasi. Afterward he says, “But one thing I didn’t understand. These people who informed on you. You write that they were afraid. But what did they have to be afraid of?” So swift is the forgetting, even in Poland.

  25 SEPTEMBER. Vladimír Mečiar is defeated in parliamentary elections in Slovakia.

  27 SEPTEMBER. Bundestag elections in Germany.

  GOOD-BYE TO BONN

  “THIS IS A HISTORIC MOMENT,” A STALWART GERMAN CHRISTIAN Democrat whispered to me as the familiar giant figure of Helmut Kohl mounted the stage at party headquarters in Bonn, shortly before seven o’clock on the evening of Sunday, 27 September 1998. As if it needed saying! Given the scale of the Christian Democrats’ electoral defeat, we all guessed that, after a staggering sixteen years in power, the chancellor of German and European unification would be stepping down. When the cries of “Helmut! Helmut!” had finally abated, he gave a dignified short speech. He congratulated the Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder on his victory and wished him “a happy hand for our land.” As for himself, he would now also retire as party leader. It felt as if the Alps had suddenly announced their departure.

  As the twentieth century draws to a close, we can safely say that Helmut Kohl is its last great European statesman. Watching him leave the stage, I thought of a memorable conversation we had a few years ago. At one moment, he took my breath away. “Do you realize,” he said, “that you are sitting opposite the direct successor to Adolf Hitler?” The point of this startling, even shocking remark was that he—the first chancellor of a united Germany since Hitler—was going to do everything quite differently. Whereas Hitler had tried to put a German roof over Europe, he was determined to put a European roof over Germany. This amazing sally encapsulated several ingredients of Kohl’s greatness: his acute instinct for power, his historical vision, and the bold simplicity of his strategic thinking. Add tactical adroitness, tireless attention to party-political details, and vast physical presence and stamina—the result is a provincial politician who changed the world.

  The election of Sunday, 27 September, was not just the end of “the Kohl era.” It marked several other ends—and new beginnings. This is the last federal election in which the parties’ election expenses will be calculated in deutsche marks. Next time around, in 2002, the deutsche mark, that totem of postwar West German prosperity, stability, and identity, will be no more. Everything will be done in euros. It was also the last election for which we will go to Bonn. Next year, parliament and government move to Berlin. As Christopher Isherwood didn’t write, “Good-bye to Bonn.”

  Walking up the modest highway that is the spine of that dank Rhineland city, with cheerful crowds thronging the pavements, their attention soon turning back from the election to a rock band, beer, and the Formula One championships just up the road, I felt a pang of regret. Bonn is a dull place, but what came to be known as “the Bonn republic” has been a good Germany—perhaps the best Germany we have ever had. In this election, it proved the maturity of its carefully constructed, quiet, civil democracy. Although the country has four million unemployed, German voters once again rejected the extremes of left and right. The old saying “Bonn is not Weimar”—that is, its democracy will not be torn apart by a flight to antidemocratic extremes, as in the Weimar republic—can now be adapted to a definitive, final form: “Bonn was not Weimar.”

  1

  We knew we were saying good-bye to Bonn and the deutsche mark. We thought we would be saying good-bye to Kohl. What we didn’t expect was a landslide that changes the whole political face of Germany. All the public-opinion polls except one showed Kohl closing the gap on Schröder. Electoral arithmetic based on these polls suggested the likelihood of a “grand coalition” in which Schröder’s Social Democrats would govern together with the Christian Democrats, the latter under a new leader. This seemed about right for the Bonn republic’s style of gradual, consensual change. It is a remarkable fact that, in the whole previous history of the Federal Republic, the government has never completely changed as a direct result of the popular vote. Either the governing coalition has changed bet
ween elections or, in the rare event of it changing at an election, one previous coalition partner has remained in power.

  This time, the voters decided otherwise. As if to show that, after half a century, German democracy has fully come of age, they produced a result that means that the Social Democrats replace the Christian Democrats as the senior partner, and the environmentalist Greens replace the Free Democrats as the Junior partner. In this so-called red-green coalition, all the faces will be new.

  Why was the vote so decisive? I saw three main reasons. First, and most important, after sixteen years people simply felt it was “time for a change.” That was the answer that came again and again in my own conversations and those reported elsewhere. The old man and his team had run out of energy and ideas. Voters were plain bored of those same old faces. Boredom is an underrated factor in politics.

  This was exactly what happened in Britain, after eighteen years of Conservative rule. A Conservative candidate in that 1997 election told me that when people asked him, “Isn’t it time for a change?” he simply had no answer. In his heart of hearts, he thought it was too. So also here. Contrary to some predictions, the crises in Russia and Asia did not make voters feel that it was better to stick with the experienced statesman.

  Second, the “Clintonblair” Schröder was a smooth, telegenic, attractive candidate, with an unusually well-disciplined Social Democratic Party behind him, led by his colleague and rival Oskar Lafontaine. Postelection research shows that the main component of the swing was straightforward: People who voted Christian Democrat last time voted Social Democrat this time. Among them were many pensioners, whose pensions Kohl had trimmed and Schröder promises to restore.

  Third, there was the east. Back in the historic spring of 1990, Helmut Kohl won a crucial election in what was still East Germany by promising to create “blooming landscapes” out of the postcommunist wasteland. That vote meant East Germany became just eastern Germany: the eastern part of a larger Federal Republic. By the time of the last federal election, in 1994, with old communist factories rusting all around, and their workers on the dole, “blooming landscapes” had become a bitter joke. I saw people holding up placards at Kohl’s election rallies saying “Where are the blooming landscapes?” or simply “Blooming landscapes!” But enough people still had enough confidence in Kohl to give the CDU the largest share of the vote.

  This time, I spent much of the pre-election week in the east. In the city of Schwerin, I watched disillusioned youngsters, many of them unemployed, heckle the chancellor as he spoke glowingly of growth and jobs. They held up a satirical banner proclaiming, “Helmut: You Are the Way, the Truth and the Light.” Then, on the hustings at a village on the outskirts of East Berlin, I was amazed to see a poster proclaiming, “Vote for Blooming Landscapes—CDU.” The left-wing cartoonist Klaus Staeck was not amused. “That was my joke,” he protested. And a joke in the end it proved to be, since the CDU vote in the east plummeted from more than 38 percent in 1994 to just over 27 percent. In the west it fell less than half as much, from just over 33 percent to just under 28 percent. It was the east that turned a defeat into a rout.

  There’s a deep irony here. For Kohl has been voted away at a time when large parts of that eastern landscape actually are beginning to “bloom.” Traveling around, I still found large patches of desolation, rust, unemployment, and the accompanying mixture of apathy among the old and often xenophobic anger among the young. But I also found impressive areas of large-scale construction, new jobs, energy, and hope.

  Nowhere else in postcommunist Europe does one see such vistas of shining new steel, glass, and concrete. Hardly surprising, given that western Germany has pumped more than DM 1,000,000,000,000 into the east over the last eight years. And there is massive private investment too. The mayor of one community in the so-called bacon belt of prosperous commuter villages around Berlin showed me the newly made streets and fire station, the freshly renovated school, and a whole estate of detached, private houses, built by local people on savings and building loans. The old kingdom of Saxony in the south is booming, under its Christian Democratic “king,” Kurt Biedenkopf. Even in the poor northern province of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which has more than 17 percent unemployment, every village I drove through had some new building projects.

  Still more important is the mental architecture. The picture you get from the British or American press is one of almost universal resignation and resentment. Yet I found people hungrily participating in a democracy that is still new to them. This was the liveliest campaign in the east since that vote for unification back in 1990. Walls were plastered with posters. Meetings were packed. More than 80 percent of those eligible turned out to vote, compared with 72 percent four years ago. And such civic activism is not confined to election time. The mayor of that “bacon belt” village tells me she is deluged with petitions and “citizens’ initiatives.” Many are dedicated to protecting the selfish interests of the new middle class. For example, the residents of that new private housing estate protest about being asked to contribute to the cost of a local “cycleway.” This is “civil society” emerging, but civil society less as the Central European dissidents dreamed of it than as Karl Marx analyzed it—the self-defense of the bourgeoisie!

  A comparison is sometimes made between the German east after unification and the American south after the Civil War. This is quite misleading. East Germany was always an artificial unit: the Soviet Zone of Occupation turned into a state. The flourishing southern Länder of Thuringia and Saxony now feel themselves closer to Bavaria than to Mecklenburg. East and West Berlin are slowly but surely getting mixed up together. The arrogance, condescension, and incomprehension that many western Germans display toward their eastern compatriots is still a big problem. It was rightly said after 1990 that Germany had been united, the Germans had not. But even that is beginning to happen. In the early 1990s, there continued to be a mass emigration of eastern Germans to the west. Last year, for the first time, almost as many western Germans came to live in the east.

  All just as Kohl promised—though a lot more slowly, more painfully, and more expensively. Yet those ungrateful easterners have bitten the hand that fed them. So now Helmut Kohl will retire to his modest house in the small western town of Oggersheim, while Gerhard Schröder will move into the grand new chancellery in the big, raw, eastern city of Berlin. A half century of the Bonn republic has suddenly and decisively ended.

  2

  New government, new capital, new currency. As New Britain’s Tony Blair likes to say, everything is new, new, new. But what can we say, or guess, about this New Germany?

  It is already being called “the Berlin republic.” Some German federalists object to the term. The Federal Republic, they argue, will still be a decentralized state. The business weekly Wirtschaftswoche ran a major article in election week arguing that Frankfurt, which narrowly failed to become the federal capital in 1949 and was again a candidate after unification, will remain the undisputed economic capital of Germany. Major newspapers are still in Hamburg, the Constitutional Court still in Karlsruhe. For all that, I think it will be “the Berlin republic,” because I think the move to Berlin will have a profound psychological impact on the politicians and hence the politics of Germany.

  Berlin is a city full of ghosts—Prussian militarist, Wilhelmine, Nazi, and communist, as well as the more attractive ghosts of Prussian intellectual life, Weimar culture, and anti-Nazi resistance. Amid these ghosts, vast, impressive new government buildings are thrusting up. These buildings do not speak of a nation that is proposing to surrender its only recently recovered sovereignty to a European superstate. Berlin is a metropolis, with many foreigners living there. Berlin is in the middle of eastern Germany, close to all the problems of the transition from communism. Berlin is just forty minutes’ drive from the Polish frontier.

  The Berlin republic, it is suggested, will be not only more eastern but perhaps also more Protestant than a Bonn republic shaped by the Catho
lic Rhineland tradition from which both Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl came. Even in a highly secularized society, this matters. The Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri has observed that a Jewish atheist and a Christian atheist are not the same thing: They disbelieve in a different God. The same may be said of Catholic atheists and Protestant atheists.

  Into this new setting moves a new generation of politicians, most in their fifties, some in their forties. Many of them, including Gerhard Schröder and the likely Green foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, are classic ’68ers, shaped by that distinctive moment of student protest across the western world. Others were formed by the protest movements of the 1970s and 1980s: feminist, ecological, against nuclear weapons, and against nuclear power. As always in German politics, another formative influence is their diverse experience of policy-making in coalition governments in the federal states. Meanwhile, years of schooling themselves for power at the national level have made them adepts of the sound bite.

  In theory, this red-green coalition will be able to stamp its mark on the new republic. Not only does it have a clear majority in the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, it also has a majority in the Bundesrat, the upper house composed of representatives of the federal states. The coalition will be able to propose its candidate for federal president and to start nominating judges to the Constitutional Court. By 2000, all the key institutions of the republic might therefore be colored “red-green.” They could even choose a president of the Bundesbank, although that is to be supplanted by the European Central Bank.

  In opposition, the Christian Democrats, like the British Conservatives, will take some time to pull themselves together again, in alliance with the Bavarian Christian Social Union. Their new leader is Wolfgang Schäuble. When I spoke to the wheelchair-bound Schäuble, one of the most thoughtful and impressive figures in German politics, he was clearly looking forward to the task of regenerating a broadly based party—what in German is called a Volkspartei—that would, among other things, prevent disgruntled voters breaking away to the nationalist right. Yet German Christian Democracy will have to redefine itself in circumstances where its three traditional unifying forces have either disappeared or faded: anticommunism, Christianity, and a shared commitment to further steps of European integration. The last mentioned is most plainly challenged by the Bavarian premier, Edmund Stoiber, sometimes jokingly called Edmund Thatcher.